


Loft

by FyrMaiden



Series: 2013 Klaine Advent [7]
Category: Glee
Genre: Ghosts, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-23
Updated: 2015-07-23
Packaged: 2018-04-10 19:55:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4405370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FyrMaiden/pseuds/FyrMaiden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kurt falls in love with the boy who lives in his loft. ('The Others' AU; *not* a story about death, although one of them is necessarily dead.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Loft

**Author's Note:**

> Kurt is a ghost before this begins. If that's a problem, please don't read. The story is about loss and not death, but I understand we all have lines in the sand?

Kurt keeps taking the drapes down. He doesn’t know who it is that hangs them, but they’re heavy and ugly, and they block the sunshine. The window they block is tall and beautiful, and it turns the otherwise dreary loft space into a cathedral of light and shadow. The loft deserves better than those drapes, and so he keeps taking them down.

He removes the books as well. They’re in the wrong order. They look ugly when they’re arranged by subject. Kurt thinks everything should have aesthetic appeal and flare. He takes them out and arranges them by colour and height, and someone always comes along and changes them back to some kind of Dewey Decimal System. He doesn’t like it. It’s a battle of wills. He puts them back by colour and height.

The loft is mostly quiet during the day as Kurt tidies and straightens the furniture and throws, and resets the clocks to ten minutes to two. He listens to the radio, sings along with old Broadway standards and classics from the great American songbook. He sways and smiles and imagines he can feel strong hands on his waist, or tilting his chin up to kiss. He imagines he can feel stubble against his lips and skin, and he misses the beautiful boys who used to want to dance with him. There’s always tomorrow, though.

It’s the nights that become unbearable. The loft door doesn’t stay shut, and there’s a constant stench of burning in the kitchen. The drawers rattle, and the lights flick on and off at random, and there’s a constant background hum of voices harmonising in song, overlaid with laughter and, occasionally, drunk sobbing and abrasive Spanish. When Kurt curls up on his side of the bed, he swears he can smell the faint trace of sweet summer fruit and the bass notes of eucalyptus. It’s not unwelcome, but it’s strange all the same.

Mornings are equally untenable. Mornings start to feel busy. The air around him crackles with energy. In the mornings, the voices are clearest. It’s a guess, but thinks there are four of them. They’re rarely all there together, though.

He actually sees him once, the pretty one whose pictures he doesn’t turn around. He comes back to the loft early one afternoon, his eyes red and his nose streaming, and Kurt feels his own breathing stop. He’s halfway through rearranging the books, the drapes already folded into the big chair that no one uses. The boy – _man_ , Kurt amends, mentally – stops inside of the door and just stares at him. Kurt responds the only way he can; he drops the books and disappears.

Later, he makes some hot lemon and honey and takes it to his bedside, presses his cool lips to the boy’s too hot brow. He hums him a lullaby he remembers from his own childhood, and strokes his sweat curled hair back from his face. In his fever, the young man says his name is Blaine, and Kurt repeats it quietly, just to feel the weight of it on his tongue. “My name is Kurt,” he says, and Blaine blinks at him with exhausted amber eyes.

It feels like five minutes to Kurt, but it could be five years or five months. The books start to disappear first, and then the ornaments and trinkets follow. The chairs go and reappear on the sidewalk outside. Kurt takes the drapes down one morning, and no one returns to put them back up. Kurt stares at them for a while, and then drifts aimlessly to the bathroom and lets hot water flood his icy skin.

The boy with the beautiful eyes comes back one last time, though, rolling the door back and slipping inside. His scarf is beautiful against his winter pale skin, but he seems otherwise flat and lifeless. “I don’t know if you’re here,” he says to the gathering dust and silence. “But I wanted to say that it’s been an honour to share your home with you, Kurt.”

Kurt wants to respond. He doesn’t know how to, though. Instead, he reaches with one transparent hand to cup Blaine’s face gently. Blaine shivers, but presses into a touch that isn’t really there, and smiles when Kurt kisses him.

When the door finally closes and Blaine is gone, Kurt fades back into view and sits on the edge of the bed they’ve shared more nights than he can count. The sunlight ghosts through him and dapples the exposed wooden floors, and he waits.

It’s the only choice he has.


End file.
